Thousand-mile-per-hour winds are blowing a hail of tiny quartz crystals through the silicate-enhanced, scorching hot atmosphere of a distant gas giant planet called WASP-17b, the James Webb Space ...

(CNN) — Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have for the first time detected tiny quartz crystals containing silica - a common mineral on Earth - within the atmosphere of a blazing hot ...

Electric currents in the Earth may be responsible for the formation of gold nuggets, new research suggests. As detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the theory could ...

We can't usually feel them, but dozens of earthquakes occur every day—and some of them are using mundane minerals to make glittering gold. Researchers have found that tectonic shifts put just the ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

More than 4 billion years ago, when the solar system was still young and the Earth was still growing, scientists think that a giant object the size of Mars crashed into the Earth. The biggest piece ...

A 7-foot-tall, 8,000-pound slab of quartz crystals found in the Ouachita Mountains was unveiled last week at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The crystals, discovered at the Coleman ...

Excited screams filled the air as two of my sons jumped from the platform and plunged downward into the mine below. Within minutes, they dropped several hundred feet and had traveled over a half-mile ...